The ‘Bond girl’ who hated their role so much they quit Hollywood: “Once was enough”
Grabbing a role in the historic James Bond franchise can be a poisoned chalice for female actors, depending on your role. Being a ‘Bond girl’ might launch a person’s career, but it also comes with baggage. More often than not, the actors who have played these roles have gone on to resent the franchise for dooming their careers. It doesn’t matter if they were accomplished stage performers or trained at prestigious institutions; they are dismissed as eye candy.
So many actors experienced a career slide after appearing as female characters in the franchise that the phenomenon became known as “the Bond girl curse“. As much as those movies can spotlight a performer, they do not highlight their abilities as actors, and they almost always frame them as flat, unintelligent sex objects. It doesn’t help that the dialogue written for these women is so wooden and unimaginative that Meryl Streep herself couldn’t make the characters feel like real people.
Many of the actors who played ‘Bond girls’ struggled to find their way in the industry, accepting similarly thankless, misogynistic roles or resorting to smaller and smaller movies. But there was one who decided to pre-empt the curse by simply opting out of Hollywood altogether. Mie Hama, who played Kissy Suzuki in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, walked away from her career just as it seemed to be taking off.
In the film, her character is a secret agent with astonishing proficiency at deep sea diving who helps prevent World War III. Mostly, however, she’s framed as a glamorous beauty in a skimpy white bikini who has a quick fling with 007. It’s a typically two-dimensional role that focuses on the actor’s body rather than the obvious intrigue of her character. When the film came out, Hama was plastered on the pages of Playboy and dubbed “the Brigitte Bardot of Japan,” but instead of riding that wave to see where it might take her, she left Hollywood and moved back to Japan. A few years later, she ended her contract with her Japanese studio, explaining that she wanted to marry and raise a family out of the spotlight.
“It was an honour to be a Bond girl, but once was enough,” Hama said in a 2017 interview with The New York Times. “I didn’t want that image to stick with me. I am actually a subdued and steady person, but I felt that somewhere beyond my control, others were creating a character named ‘Mie Hama’.”
Even when shooting the film, she felt completely removed from herself. “Everything from my weight to the height of my heels was decided,” she said. “It may have looked glamorous, but for me, it was all a huge ordeal.” Coming from a working-class background, she found an unlikely ally in Sean Connery, who became a friend during the shoot. “Every morning, he asked if I was having any trouble,” she said. “He also had a tough life before becoming a star, so he understood me.”
Despite voluntarily leaving the spotlight just when she had the opportunity to leverage it, Hama was able to build an entirely new career years later. Rather than trying to reshape her persona as an actor, she became a television and radio host, an author of more than a dozen books on parenting, etiquette, and self-discovery, and an expert on folk art. She has never made another Hollywood film and lives a quiet life in a mountain town in Japan.
